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I'm always trying to find new ways to improve my work flow, productivity and general "oh my goodness, this is so much fun that it shouldn't be called work"-ness in my daily routine. Two things I've discovered this past month, that have helped me in the art cave. 

The first discovery is Rescue Time.  It's a time management application that monitors all of the programs that I use and records the data.  It tracks how long I'm using programs or where I spend the most time on the internet.  I can group the programs into categories.  Photoshop, Painter, Thunderbird, etc get the very honorable "work" tag.  I then mark everything else as "recreational" or "waste of my very precious time". The application runs in my task bar and any time I would like, I can log in to the Rescue Time dashboard to see all the information condensed into bar graphs representing how I spent my time, daily, weekly, and monthly on the computer. It's like my own little supervisor man, with a no-nonsense expression, a white button-up collared shirt and a bad comb-over.  Perhaps he's glaring over a clip board with plentiful graphs showing how I spent entirely too much time reading RSS feeds this morning. 

If you're self-employed and work on the computer, I'm sure you can understand how useful this is. Firstly, it keeps me on a solid 40 hour week. Previously, I've been prone to workaholism because I would be unsure whether I put 40 hours in photoshop or if I had spent half of it emailing clients and marketing myself, so I'd usually do over-time on the weekends to err on the side of caution.  More importantly, I now have a very good idea how long it takes for me to create an illustration.  Knowing the actual hours spent on a piece is keeping me well informed and unbiased on how much to charge clients for the creating and revising process as well as communication.    Sure, I could keep my own hours just by watching the clock and rigidly enforcing my time on the computer, but Rescue Time makes it so much easier and takes into account all the nuances in my workday (coffee breaks ftw!). I'd seriously recommend it to anyone who is wanting to monitor and control their hours spent on the computer and who doesn't want to physically monitor it themselves.  It's been a huge help this past month with my time management.

The second improvement to my work flow this month is Autodesk Sketchbook Pro.  Oh how I wish I could write poetry because it deserves a beautiful sonnet.  I would compose in perfect rhyme about how lovely it accents my Cintiq and recognizes pen pressure with the ease of... something poetic.  I honestly don't know why I didn't try this program sooner.  I'm sure some of you are staring at me, thinking I must have been living in a rock cave with a chisel making my digital illustrations. Ok, so I should have tried it sooner, but I did try it last week.  This program's pencil tool responds so well to pen pressure and creates beautiful line widths.  I've seriously cut my sketching time in half, because I don't have to spend a lot of time cleaning up my line work.  Sure, I still go through a lot of layers until the drawing is properly refined, but it's that final line work that it has improved dramatically.  Since I've started using it, I've noticed that I'm sketching a lot more, which is always a good thing.  Below are some of the results of my feverish doodling with Sketchbook Pro.